Enigmatic Swiss cuisine revealed as a palate pleaser

For me, travel is a chance to become a detective. A food detective.

I pray for a clap of lucky lightning to guide me to a hidden local treasure, and I almost always tuck away in my bag some research and background on culinary traditions, a few Web tips from my fellow food-obsessives, a menu translator or two. Usually there is some lingering desire for a taste treat I'd been told of or read about, like herring in Norway, two-hour fried noodles in Malacca, mutton barbecue in Owensboro, Ky.

But Switzerland left me stumped.

I was thrilled to be going: a wedding celebration, a couple days of hiking and climbing beforehand, knocking around with some old pals too rarely seen.

But the food? There was only one item that had me enthused -- the mythical (for me) rosti, a humble but glorious potato pancake that had been a staple of my diet a decade or two back thanks to a roommate whose mother was Swiss. It was the only thing he knew how to cook, but, dang, he could cook it well.

Beyond that, I found it hard to get my usual excitement going. Fondue has never been my thing. The eponymous cheese? Snooze. My brother-in-law raved about the coffee -- great, but what to eat with it?

Tainting the entire endeavor was that unforgettable slap from "The Third Man," when Orson Welles' Harry Lime dismissed the entire nation in a shameful and brilliant comparison with the tumultuous, bloody history of Italy, from art to assassination.

And then I had some raclette. It's not much more than melted cheese with potatoes, though they also bring along some crusty bread, some tiny pickles, slices of dried beef and pork.

It's kind of a goofy setup: you melt the slices of cheese yourself, in a pan that sits below a burner, and then flip the melted slices with a wooden spatula onto your plate, where you've sliced the potatoes. (The flame also heats a grill above it, where you sear raw meat to eat with various sauces).

It's a bit hokey, sure.

But the smugness fades even before the first bite, seduced by the toasty, nutty smell of the melting cheese.

And then the first bite convinces. It's a creamy, grassy cheese made from cow's milk, turned intoxicating as it melts. (All the cheeses come from towns in the Valais canton of Switzerland that stretches through the Alps and abuts France and Italy).

I could rave as well about the potatoes, anything but forgettable. And the local cured meats -- ham and bresaola and sausage. It didn't hurt that we were hungry and tired after hiking all day, our appetites a faint modern approximation of the traditional mountain life of the Savoyarde, the region that straddles the French and Swiss Alps.

After that, I embraced it all.

Maybe it's best go with no expectations at all, mind and appetite open to anything that comes along. It doesn't hurt that we spent nearly all our time away from the bigger towns and cities, guided by friends or local workers to their favorite haunts.

There was tartiflette, sort of a potato au gratin dish gone wild with bacon, cream and Reblochon cheese. Breakfast was fromage blanc, the simplest creamy cheese to eat on bread, with jam, with berries. Down by Lake Geneva, there was freshwater fried perch, delicate and bright, with perfect french fries. Even the fondue had me rethinking my earlier snobbery.

We spent the final weekend at a fromagerie high up the slopes of a steep mountain valley, herds of goats to the side, herds of cows over the other ridge, all with bells tinkling around their necks in case they get lost in the mountain mists. One morning, we watched the cheese-makers at their task.

It was traditional mountain Europe, the old food of generations ago. Hearty and rich, it's not the modern diet of the remarkably slim and trim Swiss. Thankfully it's still treasured, though sometimes I wondered how much was nostalgia and tourism.

When we passed through Geneva and its suburbs, we got a glimpse of the new Europe, a mix of African and Arabic and eastern European, a European version of the American polyglot where a walk down a half-mile of avenue offers you the cuisines of a dozen cultures.

Still, there was the rosti.

With eggs and bacon, with the classic Emmental cheese (the hoary old Swiss cheese), even with vegetables, of which I'd seen few in nine days. Up in the mountains, it was glorious and rustic, crispy at the browned edges. Down on the flatlands on the return to Geneva, it was "the Swiss national dish," pushed hard at a tourist restaurant. Even then, less than glorious, it was pretty dang good.